MONTRÉAL — In the 24/7 news cycle of BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and every other “content producer” on the internet, there is a fine line between news and entertainment. In the group exhibition You Won’t Believe (. . .): A Group Exhibition about Entertainment at Division Gallery in Montréal, Québec, curator Loreta Lamargese appropriates the now-iconic Buzzfeed […]

The selfie exists everywhere that people own smartphones. DIS Magazine’s #artselfie, published by Jean Boîte Éditions, attempts to freeze one aspect of this cultural moment — the art selfie — by parlaying its meaning into a gleaming, print-only book that contains a selection of hashtagged images, an essay by writer and artist Douglas Coupland, and a conversation between DIS and Swiss Institute […]

LOS ANGELES — Benjamin Lord’s grossly delectable photographs, on view in his exhibition The New Retail Mycology at Monte Vista Projects, invite viewers to closely consider the social construction of a landscape. In each of the seven photographs on display, viewers encounter a mixture of organic and manmade materials arranged in some sort of amorphous, non-linear structure. Recognizable, store-bought […]

LOS ANGELES — Artist Jennifer Moon is not the first or the last to experiment with self-surveillance, documenting selfies of her every moment for anyone and no one. Her solo exhibition Will You Still Love Me: Learning to Love Yourself, It Is The Greatest Love of All, an installation at Equitable Vitrines, which is located in the lobby of […]

LOS ANGELES — The LA-based artist and comedian Molly Jo Shea asked me where my Dell computer was as I took out my MacBook Pro to take notes on New York collective K-HOLE’s presentation at the LA Art Book Fair, organized by REDCAT. Shea’s comment was spot-on because, after all, this was a panel by the trend forecasting […]

LOS ANGELES — For her exhibition Everyone, Gillian Wearing hired palm readers to tell her fortune without knowing her professional identity. Each one came up with drastically different predictions, suggesting the fallacy of set-in-stone definitions of destiny and fate. In the gallery, the artist presents three right-hand resin sculptures and one left hand. On them we see a variety of statements such […]

LOS ANGELES — Jacolby Satterwhite’s solo exhibition How lovly is me being as I am is born out of a maternal virtual hive mind. Satterwhite fills OHWOW, a spacious white cube in West Hollywood, with 10 large-scale C-prints from the series Satellites and En Plein Air, four nylon-and-enamel sculptures called “Metonym,” and the six-channel video “Reifying Desire.” The visual centerpiece […]

LOS ANGELES — Behind every face there is a mask. In Ray Anthony Barrett’s solo exhibition Word is Bond at Diane Rosenstein Fine Arts in Hollywood, the artist investigates American cultural identities through the use of anthropomorphized masks. Dividing up the four walls of the gallery’s project room, Barrett considers the masked identities of sexualities, the redundancy and spectacle of […]

LOS ANGELES — “Who is Tony Longo?” my editor inquired, after I pitched her on this piece about Thom Andersen’s new short film “The Tony Longo Trilogy” (2014). It makes sense that Andersen, the director of Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which discusses how the city is portrayed on film, would fixate on a specific character type or actor, in this […]

LOS ANGELES — There is a new mutant form emerging, pushing its way past the thin layer that separates the interior and exterior world. In Young Joon Kwak’s exhibition at Commonwealth & Council, Mother Spill, the artist’s body overtakes her mind, erupting into the world in a way that is neither graceful, flawless, nor incredulous — it’s just pure […]